Suchergebnisse

BRIDGES Policy Briefs 3 (December 2023)This policy brief looks at the implications of migration narratives for European policymaking. It focuses on the circulation of narratives in the national media and the EU political and policy debates in two key moments: the proposal for a relocation scheme to redistribute asylum seekers among EU Member States in 2015, and the activation of the Temporary Protection Directive for refugees fleeing Ukraine in 2022. After presenting the findings of a research report (D8.1) produced in the framework of the Horizon EU project BRIDGES, this policy brief focuses on translating these findings into policy implications for the EU. The ultimate aim is to draft recommendations for members and officials of European institutions that may contribute to shaping narratives for fairer, comprehensive, and balanced European policy responses to migration and asylum. Due to the high stakes that migration and asylum entail, institutions, political forces, and the media promote their own narratives to advocate for their preferred policy outcome. Depending on the policy solution that they are pushing forward – usually in favour or against EU-wide actions -, these narratives may identify different causes, heroes, and victims. After taking stock of dominant narratives in both case studies – namely, the one denouncing the divisions among member states in dealing with the 2015 migration and refugee 'crisis' and another in favour of solidarity-measures towards refugees fleeing Ukraine in 2022 – the brief thus argues that policymakers in the EU should (i) de-politicize discourse(s) on asylum and migration; (ii) encourage positive narratives in the media; (iii) make full use of EU institutional factors to filter populist narratives when they move from the political sphere to the policy sphere; (iv) frame narratives promoting policy solutions on migration within broader (geo)political policy areas of great value for European societies.DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10417224

The European Union pursues an active foreign policy both in a form of bilateral ties with sovereign states and while interacting with regional associations. The article considers the strategic attractiveness of the Persian Gulf region for the European Union as well as EU's external regional policy (European interregionalism) towards the Gulf Cooperation Council. The paper analyzes the methodological basis of the European interregionalism, the goals and specific directions of the EU's policy in the region, the mechanisms for its implementation, strategic changes in the EU's policy while taking into account the Arab Spring. The authors conclude that the cooperation initially planned in Brussels on the basis of exporting the liberal values could not stand the test of the Arab Spring. In the Global Strategy of 2016 the EU introduced changes that envisage a differentiated approach in the policy of European interregionalism. In the final part, the authors draw the conclusion about the effectiveness of the new EU Global strategy towards the GCC. © 2019 Institute of Europe Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Policy coordination in federal states is inherently complex because it includes a multitude of actors at the federal and the sub-state level. If the sub-states want their interests to be included in the final decision, they need to coordinate with the federal level but also amongst themselves. Several individual interests areoverlooked easier than coordinated interests of a group of sub-states. This paper puts forward the argument that during the coordination process, the actors from both levels meet in different constellations where they focus on different aspects of coordination, especially on different actors' interests separately. This is a strategy which enables them to procedurally reduce the complexity of the decision-making process. In order to empirically investigate this argument, first a thorough definition of coordination as process is provided and operationalized for empirical investigation. It is accentuated that coordination as a process has different dimensions which are relevant for the understanding of the coordination process. This argument is analyzedwith the example case of German EU policy. The empirical data used are original expert interviews with German civil servants responsible for EU policy coordination at the sub-state level. It will be demonstrated that the actors strategically form voluntary coordination constellations which enables them to reduce complexity during the process.

Policy coordination in federal states is inherently complex because it includes a multitude of actors at the federal and the sub-state level. If the sub-states want their interests to be included in the final decision, they need to coordinate with the federal level but also amongst themselves. Several individual interests areoverlooked easier than coordinated interests of a group of sub-states. This paper puts forward the argument that during the coordination process, the actors from both levels meet in different constellations where they focus on different aspects of coordination, especially on different actors' interests separately. This is a strategy which enables them to procedurally reduce the complexity of the decision-making process. In order to empirically investigate this argument, first a thorough definition of coordination as process is provided and operationalized for empirical investigation. It is accentuated that coordination as a process has different dimensions which are relevant for the understanding of the coordination process. This argument is analyzed with the example case of German EU policy. The empirical data used are original expert interviews with German civil servants responsible for EU policy coordination at the sub-state level. It will be demonstrated that the actors strategically form voluntary coordination constellations which enables them to reduce complexity during the process.

We propose a simple and flexible econometric approach to quantify ex-ante the "deep" impact of trade liberalization and the "hard" effects of protection with the empirical structural gravity model. Specifically, we argue that the difference between the estimates of border indicator variables for affected and non-affected countries can be used as a comprehensive measure of the change in bilateral trade costs in response to a hypothetical policy change. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, we focus on the integration between the countries from the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) and the European Union (EU); an important policy application that has not been studied before due to lack of data. We overcome this challenge by utilizing a new dataset on trade and production that covers all EU countries and all CEFTA members (except for Kosovo). The partial equilibrium estimates that we obtain confirm the validity of our methods, while the corresponding general equilibrium effects point to significant and heterogeneous potential gains for the CEFTA countries from joining the EU. The proposed methods can also be extended to ex-post analysis and are readily applicable to other applications, e.g. "hard" Brexit.

This paper uses campaign contribution data to examine trade policy preferences among political action committees. With perfect factor mobility, as the Heckscher–Ohlin (HO) model assumes, interest group trade positions should depend on their factor of production but not on their industry. We show, consistent with the 2 × 2 HO model, that capital groups consistently back representatives supporting trade liberalization while labor groups favor protectionists. Unlike previous work, we also measure the variation in trade policy preferences within capital and labor groups. We find evidence that the industry net export position significantly affects labor unions' trade policy preferences. Industry characteristics have no impact on capital group lobbying. The former result suggests that empirical analyses of labor PAC contributions that exclude industry characteristics may be misspecified.

EU coordination in Greece: "forced" Europeanization under the MoU? / Calliope Spanou -- EU coordination in Ireland : centralization to master the crisis / Brigid Laffan -- EU coordination in Portugal : continuity and flexibility in a Troika Regime / José M. Magone -- EU coordination in Cyprus : the limits of Europeanization in times of crisis / Adonis Pegasiou -- EU coordination in Italy : (predominantly) internally driven changes in times of crisis / Sabrina Ragone